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The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go
by TimByte 4mo ago
The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go
- verve_rat 4mo agoThere is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
- harvey9 4mo agoDo you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoThere's also the worry whether productivity is real.
- harvey9 4mo agoIf you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoComparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy. Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem. Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
- zozbot234 4mo agoThe emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
- oldsecondhand 4mo agoHelped or overworked?
- taneq 4mo agoAutomation is a boon when it automates away tedium, but also a curse for the people that subsist by enduring that tedium.
- pembrook 4mo ago> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work. Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude. You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing. How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen. In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
- bigbuppo 4mo agoThe other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
- YeahThisIsMe 4mo agoI don't see what the big worry is unless you're heavily invested. Plenty of investments go bust.
- LtWorf 4mo agoBecause of the huge amounts involved.
- RajT88 4mo agoAs people have pointed out - this also happened during the DotCom bust. Eventually all that infra got used.
- saalweachter 4mo agoFun fact! During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared. NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.
- bigbuppo 4mo agoFiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.
- Telemakhos 4mo agoThere are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
- verve_rat 4mo agoJust because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
- wizzwizz4 4mo agoThe Washing Machine Project (https://www.thewashingmachineproject.org/ https://www.thewashingmachineproject.org/) is trying to provide this benefit to people without ready access to mains electricity, by providing hand-cranked, portable washing machines. Hopefully it's more of a success than OLPC was: https://bathsdr.org/resources/the-washing-machine-project-india/bath-sdr-quip-case-study-twmp/ https://bathsdr.org/resources/the-washing-machine-project-in... shows mixed results.